One Way

So many paths, so many ways,
All ways, one way, the way of God.

God is one, the way is one, they are all. No paradox here. So many names for the unity of the universe, the sum of all things. Call it God, call it the way, call it the unified theory, or Buddha; call it what you will. The great tapestry web, so many threads, so many lives and streams of being. I am part of the whole, and the whole is part of me.

Does all this sound like religion, or faith, or blind belief? Or is it science, the sum of knowledge? The fundamental interconnectedness of all things?

So, here begins a story, a story that I hesitate to write. After all, so much has been said, written, published, can there really be anything to add? Is it ethical to claim to have something new to tell the world, when everything has been said before? Is it arrogance to claim insight, or new understanding? Can there really be a new story?
I doubt that there is really much left to say, but then again, it may be an arrogance of a different sort to claim that I know that everything mankind needs to know has already been said. And so, I tell my story. Readers can judge for themselves if there is anything of value here.
I shall attempt some kind of biographical sketch, largely chronological, a story of a life lived, warts and all. If I can offer some insight, some wisdom for others to follow, well, then, all well and good. Of course, the chronology may need to be shuffled about a bit: after all, recall is not perfect, and when a thought occurs, it is probably best to place where it occurred in the present, rather than force it into a place on some half-remembered timeline of a past. Perhaps the occurrence of a thought at a chronologically inappropriate place is a drawing together of threads, a hyperlink of the mind that integrates the disparate paths and segments of a life. And so I write on.


In the beginning… a pompously biblical start, perhaps, yet this is certainly not a biblical story… so start again…

In my beginning, well, of course I don’t remember it, my beginning. Nevertheless, I’ve been told that I was born in Rochford hospital, on Christmas Eve, 1965, to a devoutly Jewish mother, and a rather less devoutly Jewish father. My birth certificate claims to confirm this, and I have no real reason to believe otherwise. So there it is, I was born, and I can’t honestly say I remember much else from my earliest years.
There was a carpet, full of angular patterns of colour, background in black, with concentric squares flecked with orange, red, green and blue, on which I used to crawl around. Perhaps my first memory. I was reminded of this when my son was learning to crawl – together we followed the patterns on the white tiles in our house in Hualien. This was one of those special moments, when you lose yourself in intricate details of apparently so little consequence, and yet so pleasurable…

But of course, if I try to record every memory I have, it will take more than another lifetime to write this little piece. So I’ll try to skip the less interesting parts. This raises another problem for me. How can I tell what is more interesting and what is less? My experience tells me that both detail and big picture are equally important, and I cannot really know to which of these words any particular reader will accord value. The flapping of a butterfly’s wings, or the dropping of a nuclear bomb: which really has the greatest effect on our world, our history? Without a God’s eye view of the world, it is extremely hard for any of us to judge the relative importance of things, of anything.